Thursday, August 18, 2011

MG Siegler slams AT&T over "streamlined" messaging plans

So with the services now out there making people less reliant on SMS, what was going to happen? People were going to want to downgrade their plans. Who wants to pay $20 a month when you’re using only a handful of messages? Why not pay $10? Well, now you can’t. You can either pay $20 for unlimited, or have no plan and pay AT&T’s ridiculous per-message rate.

AT&T knows that most people are not going to chose the latter. Again, we’re not to the point yet where people will be fully comfortable letting go of SMS. Hell, all of the services I mentioned use it as a backup in one way or another.

Think of it this way: unlimited SMS is heroin. The $10 a month limited plan is methadone which you could have used to wean yourself off. AT&T has just cut off the methadone supply. They’re daring you to go cold turkey. Most won’t be able to.

And maybe they deserve it. But Siegler does omit a key bit of information: if you're already an AT&T customer you can keep your existing plan. Indeed, AT&T killed off their $5.00/200 plan in January. But I've still got it. No untoward billing issues or unexplained increase in my bill.

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This blog was born out of frustration as way to document my search for the perfect web-based note-taking service. As I said when I started, there's no shortage of imperfect, not-quite-there applications and ideas. And that's more or less still the case.

After a long-ish hiatus, I've decided to broaden the horizons for this blog. To write on more topics and to include shorter posts. I'm hoping you remain an interested reader after the transition.

I do keep a public notebook using Evernote, which I think is the best all-around notetaking service available. I encourage you to check in over there, and see what's keeping me interested.